Fall TV: What happens in ‘Vegas’ stays on CBS

On first glance, you might be tempted to think CBS is resting on its considerable laurels as television’s ratings monarch: There’s nothing you could point to as particularly groundbreaking about the smattering of new shows offered for the fall.

On the other hand, CBS has gotten where it is in recent years through a relatively conservative and reliable programming vision and why mess with success? NBC can have animals run amok in a veterinary hospital and FX can push every corner of the envelope: CBS will play the determined tortoise.

Entertainment President Nina Tassler walked onto the stage of the Beverly Hilton’s International Ballroom Sunday morning, clutching a stuffed monkey, a not so subtle reference to NBC having trotted out Crystal the monkey last week to promote its new sitcom “Animal Practice.” However, Tassler’s toy primate sported a “How I Met Your Mother” monkey tie and didn’t jump on the heads of members of the Television Critics Association gathered here for their summer press tour.

Tassler delivered a simple message in her brief opening remarks, which can be summarized as “we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing and now I’ll take questions.”

That philosophy shows in the new programs. The exquisite British actress Janet Montgomery stars as a Jersey girl with big hair and a credible Jersey accent in “Made in Jersey,” a legal procedural launching Sept. 28 which can be described as USA’s “Fairly Legal” with bigger hair and transported from San Francisco to the East Coast. She studied Mira Sorvino to get the accent down, she said.

The cast and producers fell all over themselves trying to distance themselves from “Jersey Shore” and “The Real Housewives of New Jersey,” but clearly the current popularity of all things Jersey has played some inspirational role in the creation of the new show. After all, it could have just as easily been called “Made in Dorchester” and given Montgomery a chance to fine-tune her Southie accent.

She still could have kept the big hair.

Michael Urie and David Krumholtz play a couple of architects in “Partners,” created by Max Mutchnick and David Kohan taking inspiration from their longtime friendship and fertile business partnership as gay and straight, respectively, creators of shows like “Will & Grace.” James Burrows is also involved with the show and it does show promise, but, frankly, when your pilot isn’t as funny or engaging as listening to its two creators trading quips and one-liners in a hotel ballroom, you might want to ramp up the writing a bit. The show premieres on Sept. 24.

The new drama “Vegas,” premiering Sept. 25, has sterling casting, with Dennis Quaid doing his first episodic TV since “Baretta” in the ‘70’s and joined by Michael Chiklis

(“The Shield”) and Jason O’Mara (“Terra Nova”) in a big, sprawling drama based on the life of former real-life Las Vegas sheriff Ralph Lamb. It pits Quaid’s crime-solving rancher against Chiklis’ mobster and is set in the early ‘60s. Unlike an earlier show of a similar name, it won’t spell “Vegas” with a “$” at the end.

The show’s provenance stretches back to a film treatment by Nick Pileggi (“Casino”), who is among the executive producers now.

The significance of these shows is that they are rather old-fashioned, in a good way. Even “Partners” feels comfortable—Kohan and Mutchnick broke ground when they launched “Will & Grace” in 1998. There’s nothing at all edgy about the show or the subject matter in this century.

Comparing the offerings to last year’s CBS premieres, regardless of its pedigree, “Vegas” doesn’t milk the post-9/11 cultural paranoia the way “Person of Interest” does. Similarly, “Unforgettable,” before it was axed, asked viewers to accept that Poppy Montgomery’s character was one of a handful of people in the world with perfect recall of every minute and day of their lives. The only thing “Made in Jersey” requires of viewers is to accept that people still use a lot of hairspray in New Jersey.